February 2010

Yes, I have been quiet (here) over the last few months, and have a number of things to comment on. This hiatus is partly because of schedule, partly because I had my laptop stolen, and partly health reasons. However, I'm going…

I don't know about you, but when I teach I am constantly using analogies to relate computing concepts to real-world experiences the students are familiar with. Some of these are pretty standard and well known among CS teachers…

Why not use the iPhone interface as the basis for a new round of Apple computers? What if Microsoft scrapped the front end of Windows 7 and the troubled Vista OS and moved to the new, elegant interface it is using for its Windows…

If publications continue to rely on selling advertising to support their costs, how does that serve the audience’s needs? Fast Company provides three ideas for how newspapers can refocus on readers.
“If it’s true that readers…

Focusing on improving and innovating services is a smart way to foster economic growth. Jeneanne Rae reports from the Netherlands.
“Recognizing the need to steer the typical conversation about innovation away from technology…

Jamais Cascio, who covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation for Fast Company, is in the process of publishing an ‘occasional’ series of articles “about the tools and methods for thinking about…

Videos of the November 23, 2009 Diabetes Innovation Fair at the IIT Institute of Design are now on the web.
Graduate students presented design innovation proposals from three courses: Platform Strategy, Persuasive Technology,…

I hate to follow the interestingconversations on FOCS/STOC/SODA (please keep commenting) with the mundane, but Lance forced me asked me to be General Chair for STOC, which means looking over things like the budget. Registration…

Sands Research sends along complete rankings and background from their yearly Superbowl Ad study. " ... Leading neuromarketing firm Sands Research announced today that it has completed its annual study gauging the effectiveness…

Some time ago I mentioned the increasing dive for in-store automatic preparation of foods, here in the Chicago Sun Times, the manufacture of snack chips in the store. High margin and shopper engagement with the process . See …

Holger Kisker in the Forrester blog writes about the convergence of business intelligence and business process management. ' ... When business processes finally become intelligent? Over the past several months I have done a lot…

Luca De Biase, the journalist I translated this morning, continues to add interesting commentary:
Excerpts from this post (translated into English):
“The Italian sentence on Google says fundamentally that the judges do not consider…

In late 2009 DARPA held its Network Challenge, a competition designed to see how online social networks could locate 10 red weather balloons moored throughout the continental US. This series describes one team's experiences in…

Continuing from my last "controversial" post, David Karger offered the following long comment, turned into a guest post:------------I wanted to post a comment on Mike's FOCS/STOC post, but fittingly for one of the dinosaurs he…